Most of our students adopt either my Momentum or Reversal Day Trading Strategies. Once you choose the one that is a good match for your skill level, your risk management tolerance, and the time of day you plan to trade, you are ready to get started. Students in our Day Trading Course can download our written trading plan documents and I’m able to actually oversee them while they are trading.
Day traders are attuned to events that cause short-term market moves. Trading the news is a popular technique. Scheduled announcements such as economic statistics, corporate earnings or interest rates are subject to market expectations and market psychology. Markets react when those expectations are not met or are exceeded, usually with sudden, significant moves, which can benefit day traders.
Foreign exchange (Forex) products and services are offered to self-directed investors through Ally Invest Forex LLC. NFA Member (ID #0408077), who acts as an introducing broker to GAIN Capital Group, LLC ("GAIN Capital"), a registered FCM/RFED and NFA Member (ID #0339826). Forex accounts are held and maintained at GAIN Capital. Forex accounts are NOT PROTECTED by the SIPC. View all Forex disclosures
Range trading, or range-bound trading, is a trading style in which stocks are watched that have either been rising off a support price or falling off a resistance price. That is, every time the stock hits a high, it falls back to the low, and vice versa. Such a stock is said to be "trading in a range", which is the opposite of trending.[13] The range trader therefore buys the stock at or near the low price, and sells (and possibly short sells) at the high. A related approach to range trading is looking for moves outside of an established range, called a breakout (price moves up) or a breakdown (price moves down), and assume that once the range has been broken prices will continue in that direction for some time.
Scalping is a trading strategy geared towards profiting from minor price changes in a stock's price. Traders who implement this strategy place anywhere from 10 to a few hundred trades in a single day with the belief that small moves in stock price are easier to catch than large ones; traders who implement this strategy are known as scalpers. Many small profits can easily compound into large gains, if a strict exit strategy is used to prevent large losses.
Day traders are attuned to events that cause short-term market moves. Trading the news is a popular technique. Scheduled announcements such as economic statistics, corporate earnings or interest rates are subject to market expectations and market psychology. Markets react when those expectations are not met or are exceeded, usually with sudden, significant moves, which can benefit day traders.
The profit potential of day trading is perhaps one of the most debated and misunderstood topics on Wall Street. Internet day trading scams have lured amateurs by promising enormous returns in a short period. The idea that this kind of trading is a get-rich-quick scheme persists. Some people day trade without sufficient knowledge. But there are day traders who make a successful living despite—or perhaps because of—the risks.
Intraday means "within the day." In the financial world, the term is shorthand used to describe securities that trade on the markets during regular business hours. These securities include stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Intraday also signifies the highs and lows that the asset crossed throughout the day. Intraday price movements are particularly significant to short-term or day traders looking to make multiple trades over the course of a single trading session. These busy traders will settle all their positions when the market closes.
Retail investors are prone to psychological biases that make day trading difficult. They tend to sell winners too early and hold losers too long, what some call “picking the flowers and watering the weeds.” That’s easy to do when you get a shot of adrenaline for closing out a profitable trade. Investors engage in myopic loss aversion, which renders them too afraid to buy when a stock declines because they fear it might fall further.
Trading: Spotting the trend and momentum comes in handy for a scalper who can even enter and exit briefly to repeat a pattern. A novice needs to understand the market pulse, and once the scalper has identified that, trend trading and momentum trading can help achieve more profitable trades. Another strategy used by scalpers is countertrend. But beginners should avoid using this strategy and stick to trading with the trend.
Tactics used to take advantage of the uptrend can also be applied to trade the downtrend. Again, since it’s very difficult to predict exactly how long a bear rally, or “counter trend” may last, you should enter a bearish swing trade only after it seems that the stock has continued downwards. To do this, examine the bear rally very closely. If the stock heads lower than the counter trend’s previous day’s low, the swing trader could enter a bearish position.
Spreads are bonuses as well as costs - Stock Markets operate on a bid and ask based system. The numerical difference between the bid and ask prices is referred to as the spread between them. The ask prices are immediate execution (market) prices for quick buyers (ask takers); bid prices for quick sellers (bid takers). If a trade is executed at market prices, closing that trade immediately without queuing would not get you back the amount paid because of the bid/ask difference. The spread can be viewed as trading bonuses or costs according to different parties and different strategies. On one hand, traders who do NOT wish to queue their order, instead paying the market price, pay the spreads (costs). On the other hand, traders who wish to queue and wait for execution receive the spreads (bonuses). Some day trading strategies attempt to capture the spread as additional, or even the only, profits for successful trades.

When you start day trading you’ll have a host of difficult decisions to make. Should you be using Robinhood? What about day trading on Coinbase? Do you have the right desk setup? Where can you find an excel template? How do you set up a watch list? The meaning of all these questions and much more is explained in detail across the comprehensive pages on this website.

With over 50+ years of combined trading experience, Trading Strategy Guides offers trading guides and resources to educate traders in all walks of life and motivations. We specialize in teaching traders of all skill levels how to trade stocks, options, forex, cryptocurrencies, commodities, and more. We provide content for over 100,000+ active followers and over 2,500+ members. Our mission is to address the lack of good information for market traders and to simplify trading education by giving readers a detailed plan with step-by-step rules to follow.

Even if you're a complete beginner in trading, you must have come across the term "scalping" at some point. Scalping in the foreign exchange market is a method of trading certain currencies based on real-time technical analysis. The main goal of scalping is to make a profit through purchasing or selling currencies by holding a position for a very short period of time, and closing it for a small profit. Without further ado, let's dive right in and see what one of the most popular Forex scalping strategies – the 1-minute Forex scalping strategy – has to offer.

Trending stocks rarely move in a straight line, but instead in a step-like pattern. For example, a stock might go up for several days, followed by a few steps back during the next few days before heading north again. If several of these zig-zag patterns are strung together, and the chart appears to be moving higher with some degree of predictability, the stock is said to be in an uptrend.

Day trading is defined as the purchase and sale of a security within a single trading day. It can occur in any marketplace but is most common in the foreign exchange (forex) and stock markets. Day traders are typically well-educated and well-funded. They use high amounts of leverage and short-term trading strategies to capitalize on small price movements in highly liquid stocks or currencies.